Cassini Mission

The Cassini Mission is a large scale project designed to study Jupiter and Saturn. It is somewhat in the grand tradition of the Voyager missions of the late 70's, and has some elements in common with the more recent Galileo mission.

NASA illustration

The Cassini spacecraft itself is large, standing over two stories tall. The craft will do two gravity assist maneuvers past Venus and one on Earth before heading out to Jupiter and Saturn.

Cassini is an international space exploration mission. The Huygens probe, built by the European Space Agency, will be launched to Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. Some of the experimental equipment was provided by ASI, the Italian space agency.

The plan is for Cassini to travel more than 2.2 billion miles over a decade, carrying 18 experimental instruments.